Difmap: An interactive Program for Synthesis Imaging

M.C.Shepherd
California Institute of Technology

Session ID: T11.02   Type: oral

Abstract:

Difmap is a stand-alone program used by the radio-astronomy community to produce images from radio interferometers. It reads and writes the standard UV FITS file format produced by packages such as AIPS, and provides convenient ways to inspect, edit and self-calibrate visibility data while incrementally building up a model of the sky. It has proven to be a popular alternative to larger packages that do much more, so part of this talk will focus on why this is so, and on whether the lessons so learned could benefit future projects. Some time will also be spent describing the general structure of Difmap, particularly with regard to how its containment within a single-process is exploited to achieve speed, portability and a degree of interactivity that is hard to match in larger systems.





Patrick P. Murphy
Tue Sep 10 22:25:05 EDT 1996